


Enamel

by hydianway



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Lost Years, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 08:39:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4472669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydianway/pseuds/hydianway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt "forgetting why it mattered" from this list <a href="http://sapphicmodernity.tumblr.com/post/124362800685/30-multipurpose-prompts-open-to-interpretation">here</a>. </p><p>Remus, in the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enamel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [montparnasse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/gifts).



> this was also posted to [tumblr](http://sapphicmodernity.tumblr.com/post/125563284990/for-the-multipurpose-writing-prompts-23).

There had been, in the morning, a cup of tea left cold on the windowsill in Sirius’s favourite mug, dark blue enamel and the lone remainder of a set of four James’s mum had given them as a housewarming present just after he and Sirius had moved into the flat.

Remus thinks about it a lot, the mug, the sill, the imperfection of all their lives in the breakdown and the odd loose ends never quite perfectly trimmed. He thinks about it a lot, in the off-moments and the quiet, and places where it feels as if the fabric of the space will tolerate his particular brand of what isn’t quite melodrama, becalmed colour paired with thoughts that don’t quite follow. 

Sometimes it’s like: before the act of betraying everyone who you ostensibly love and who loves you, you really ought finish off your tea, and make sure to do the washing up, just because no one really wants to deal with that after nothing is the same anymore and obviously you still care about that, somewhere, please, and that kind of useless untidiness is not very much in line with what a tragedy ought to look like, didn’t you know? 

Or: when you realise just after you’ve settled down with a nice cuppa that you’re running late for a rendezvous with the most powerful dark wizard of the past century, just run off for your meeting and leave it all there because evil can’t wait the extra five minutes it would take for you to finish it off and maybe even rinse it out in the sink, but really, did you have to, and why were you even trying to drink tea at a time like that, and why does it even matter, anyway?  

Maybe you leave it all messy on purpose, as a blindingly stupid, and tiny, and very oddly painful reminder of the person who everyone had once thought you were, and if you could please do make sure to throw in various of your dirty clothes all over the bedroom floor, it’d be lovely, just for good measure and since there’s no use doing things by halves now is there? 

Sirius had also left the debris of his morning routine strewn all over the bathroom, and his side of the bed unmade, and it is this that Remus finds it easiest to hate him for at first, perversely and somewhat paradoxically, as if he is wishing that Sirius’s crimes are limited to within the sphere of the merely irritating and domestic and therefore to within the scope of normal relationship breakdowns and everyday interpersonal disaster. Because, he doesn’t know if people are built to absorb shocks like these, are maybe only emotionally earthquake-proofed to the extent that buildings are supposed to be, so that whatever happens they are still standing but just _standing_ is all they are fit for.

Cracked plasterboard insides and ceiling-sprung leaks; splintered rafters and overturned furniture; just this side of unlivable until pulled down or very extensively repaired. But it’s harder to work out how to go about rebuilding a person. 

So he thinks about the small things, and cleans the bathroom on the Monday.

On the Tuesday he finds a box out the back of the supermarket carpark, and on the Wednesday he puts in it everything he can’t bear to throw out.

He does the washing up on Thursday, when he’s thinking about eating again and when it starts to smell rotten, and Friday he spends the whole day almost hiding in a corner of the public library. He goes home anyway though, to try to charm black hair and dog fur off the sofa, to spray the whole house with terrible Muggle air freshener and sneeze his way through the evening in front of something on the telly that he doesn’t really watch. 

On Saturday, to commemorate the passing of an entire week, he tips the blue mug of tea down the drain and scours out the ring of mould that has formed inside, then very carefully places it at the back of the cupboard, behind the Christmas novelty mugs that he mostly keeps around because they’ve twice the volume of the usual sort and it’s helpful, sometimes, to have an enormous and very loudly coloured reindeer themed mug to warm the empty space between your hands.

Afterwards the flat is clean, or as close to it as he can manage, and the rent is paid six months in advance and he can’t afford a new place anyway, so he stays, living through rooms filled with worn sheets and once,  _you-me-us_  laughter, ghost echoes and remembered blame.

&&&

Now he goes to sleep every night, wakes up in the morning with the sunrise and hurts, pressed dull down into the pit of his stomach and out to the tips of his fingers, winter-blunted and cold in the air. There is a job, five days a week, and two days left for his own, to be quiet and as strange as he pleases, to fold himself up small and grit his teeth at icy drafts that whistle through the flat. 

Saturday finds him sitting in the patch of hopeful almost-sunlight at his living room window and watching the street below, letting the kettle on the stove scream itself into hysteria in the next room till he thinks it’s in danger of catching fire or melting off the handle again, and he pulls himself upright to see about the cup of tea he’d meant to be making for himself.

Sunday he lies in the bath, watching his pruned pale fingertips until the water runs cold and he starts to shiver. 

One weekend he apparates to the north of France, and spends the afternoon standing on a rainswept beach in Brittany, ragged cliffs to his back and slate grey-green water, yellow-foam waves ahead of him, stretching out maybe back to England, or to Iceland or the North Pole. 

He doesn’t really have any way of knowing; his sense of direction has never been a strong point, but he thinks about how the sea stretches its uneven ripples right across the skin of the world in all its wholeness, and about how here he is, stood on a beach at 183cm of flesh and bone and blood, which is a miracle in and of itself maybe of no less magnitude than the ocean. Here in the salt spray, for the first time in months, he almost feels as if he can breathe cleanly again. 

&&&

A year later he drops the dark blue enameled mug trying to get it out of the back of the cupboard. It breaks, decorating the plain timber floorboards with fine dust and neat shards of porcelain, shocking the cat that he’s somehow adopted from its sleeping place on one of the kitchen chairs. 

Remus flinches at the noise but no further, and collects up all the pieces to put them in the bin, then sits down in front of the news to wonder why Mrs Potter had given them such delicate mugs, or maybe it was Lily, and why was that one all the way at the back of the cupboard, anyway.


End file.
